Iran's President Ahmadinejad Meets with Fidel Castro

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro review an honor guard at the Revolution Palace in Havana Photo: Reuters

During his Latin American trip this week Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met with former Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

The two met behind closed doors in Havana on Thursday where they reportedly talked about major international and regional developments and the importance of coherence between revolutionary countries, according to Iran's Fars news agency.

Our positions, versions, interpretations are alike, very close. We have been good friends, we are and will be, and we will be together forever. Long live Cuba, Ahmadinejad after the meeting.

Ahmadinejad also met with Raul Castro, the Communist nation's current president and Fidel's younger brother, and they discussed issues facing both countries.

It was a good visit, we discussed quite a lot, we analyzed quite a lot, we finished very late, Raul Castro said of the talks.

One of the those issues is surely the U.S. Both countries have a shaky relationship with America and while U.S.-Cuba tensions have mildly improved since the Cold War, Iran-U.S. relations appear to be deteriorating.

Around the same time that Ahmadinejad was speaking with the Cuban leaders, Japan had just agreed to support the U.S.'s sanctions on Iran by importing less Iranian oil.

Currently the U.S. and Iran are in a row over the Islamic Republic's supposed nuclear weapons program. The U.S., along with the European Union, have recently imposed new sanctions on Iran with hopes that they will put significant economic pressure on Teheran

Not one to back down, Iran has in turn threatened to close down the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf shipping lane through which 40 percent of the world's exported oil passes.

Iran has continually maintained that its nuclear program is only for energy and resource purposes but a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency in November indicated that Iran has in the past tried to build an atomic weapon and could still be doing so.

Tensions also reached a head on Wednesday when an Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated in Tehran by two unknown attackers who attacked a magnetic sticky bomb to his car. Iran quickly blamed both Israel and the U.S. for the incident. Both have denied responsibility.

Ahmadinejad traveled to Ecuador later on Thursday and visited Venezuela and Nicaragua before arriving in Cuba on Wednesday.